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I hope you’ve been spending your Blasphemy Day thinking irreverent thoughts and committing sacrilegious acts. I’ve been at a humanist conference where we damned religion to heck, and I’m about to board an airplane where I will spend the flight putting finishing touches on a profane pro-science and anti-religion (anti-moderate religion, even) column for Free Inquiry, and I’ll try to find a few minutes to cuss out the non-existent angels who are not holding my airplane up in the sky.

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It’s been difficult to be an open atheist in my society. I went into a profession dominated by religious men, and while it doesn’t interfere with the work we do, I’m often faced with smug Christians trying to prove their superiority. I am an atheist firefighter, the only one I know. And here’s why.

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The Palm Springs library talk last week went well: reasonable crowd given the venue, lots of good questions, and though they weren’t set up for video there’s some talk of my doing a repeat even more local and I’ll make sure we get video of that, if it happens.

One of the questions that came up was about something that was related to the topic of my talk but worthy of its whole own presentation: cryptobiotic soil crusts. I was instructed to come up with an hour-long presentation on the topic and come back. I think they may have been kidding.

Cryptobiotic soil crusts, also referred to as cryptogamic soils, or just plain “crypto,” are pretty common in arid lands that haven’t been disturbed for a while. They’re alive, as indicated by the suffix “biotic”: living communities of half a dozen different kinds of organisms: cyanobacteria, green and brown algae, fungi, lichens, mosses and liverworts. The “crypto” part means that when conditions are less than optimal, the organisms that make up the crust can go dormant, seeming to die off — “hiding” their life. Cryptobiotic.

Of course, it could just be that the organization is so desperate for volunteer help that they’ll take the dregs. That’s not a confidence builder, either.

There’s a petition. Unfortunately, it’s already full of trolls using fake names — change.org really needs to tighten up their procedures. These petitions already reek of uselessness, and the fact that they’re so easily gamed makes them totally pointless.

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I finally had to disable comments on two of my youtube videos, one on Atheism+ and another on the Thunderf00t affair. Why? Because the commenters were just too stupid and far too repetitive. Seriously, if youtube commenters don’t bother to read each others comments, and therefore say exactly the same idiotic comments over and over again, why should I bother to read them myself? And in most of the cases, it was just people reciting their knee-jerk hatred while clearly not even paying any attention to what was actually said in the video (to blame: Thunderf00t linked to those videos, told everyone a distorted version of their content, and then his followers jumped in to regurgitate the Asshole Approved commentary.)

So I finally got bored with the pile of stupid and shut them down. I’m not going to allow comments on any future youtube videos, either — instead, I’ll redirect them to the comments section Pharyngula and let them try to babble here. I’m going to add links to this post to each of the videos; either they’ll ignore it, because it takes too much effort to puke up something on a blog, or we’re about to experience an inundation of inanity. I’m expecting the former; really, these gomers are not the brightest lot.

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Actually, I prefer to call myself an ‘anti-theist’, but that usually draws empty, quizzical stares or instant loathing and contempt, both of which can be disturbingly enjoyable. For my current and long-standing atheism, I blame Arthur C. Clark, Stanley Kubrick and Johann Strauss II. Let me explain.